By Humaira Ahad
At a moment when Israeli spy units believed Hamas had been deterred, its military preparations were continuing in plain sight.
Training exercises were held in Gaza. Hamas leaders spoke about economic relief and the easing of restrictions.
Israel interpreted the resistance movement’s conduct as evidence that it was increasingly interested in governing than in launching a major confrontation against occupation.
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, was counting on that assumption being wrong.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led resistance fighters breached the heavily fortified perimeter separating Gaza from the occupied territories, attacking Israeli military positions.
The operation, known as Al-Aqsa Flood, exposed profound failures in Israeli intelligence and shattered the regime’s long-standing sense of military superiority.
Behind the operation stood Sinwar, alongside the resistance movement’s military commander, Mohammed Deif.
Al-Aqsa Flood was the culmination of years of preparation, information gathering and efforts to sabotage Israeli assumptions about Hamas’s intentions. Its scale and consequences made Sinwar an eternal symbol of resistance in the world.
Understanding how he reached that moment requires looking beyond the day of the operation, to the years he spent in Israeli prisons, his deep study of the occupation structure, and the political conditions that shaped his decisions.
Prison, place to study the enemy
First arrested in 1982, at the age of 19, he was arrested again in the years that followed. In 1988, he received four life sentences for his role in the killing of Palestinians collaborating with Israel.
He would spend more than two decades in prison before being released in October 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange.
He learned Hebrew and immersed himself in the language, literature and media of settler society.
He read books by Zionist theorists, politicians and intelligence officials, followed Hebrew-language television and studied assessments produced by Israeli security figures. He took meticulous notes, filling thousands of pages in journals that were distributed among fellow Palestinian prisoners.
The work was guided by a practical principle: to understand the opponent in its own language and on its own terms.
A former chief of Israel’s Shin Bet security service described Sinwar as “a kind of calm and decisive leader” and said he “read the strategy of the Shin Bet leaders,” following the rule of “know your enemy.”
In an interview with Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari, Sinwar insisted that Yaari speak Hebrew after the journalist tried to address him in Arabic.
“No, speak Hebrew. You speak better Hebrew than the wardens,” Sinwar said. He knew Yaari from the Israeli television broadcasts he had watched in prison.
The remark conveyed something of his method. Hebrew was not just a language he had acquired while imprisoned, it gave him access to the political vocabulary, public debates and occupation tactics of the society that controlled Palestinian life. His reading was an attempt to understand how Israel assessed threats, how its leaders explained their decisions and how its internal divisions might affect its conduct.
Sinwar described the experience of imprisonment in terms that connected individual reflection to collective Palestinian life.
“Prison builds you, especially if you are Palestinian because you live amid checkpoints, walls, restrictions of all kinds,” he said in an interview from jail. “Only in prison you finally meet other Palestinians, and you have time for talking. You think about yourself, too. About what you believe in, and the price you are willing to pay.”
The Israeli prison system is designed to brutally confine and control Palestinians. Sinwar used his years inside it to study Israel and refine his own commitments to resistance.
His understanding of Israeli society also informed a prediction he made long before October 7. He told an Israeli official that the divisions between religious and secular Israelis would deepen and weaken the country.
“Fissures between the Zionist entity’s religious and secular populations would deepen. After twenty years, you will become weak, and I will attack you,” Sinwar said.
The statement is an indication of how he assessed power. Israel’s military superiority, in his view, did not eliminate vulnerabilities within regime’s society. He was watching for changes in the political conditions that sustained that superiority and considering how they might affect the balance between Israel and Palestinian resistance.
Israeli political and military analyst Amos Harel later wrote in Haaretz: “The sense in Israeli society is that we are going down the drain, and Sinwar helped drag us there.”
Strategist forged in Israeli prisons
Sinwar’s years in prison shaped his thinking about how to confront a militarily superior adversary.
In the late 1990s, he and fellow Hamas prisoner Mohammed Sharatha developed a plan to capture an Israeli soldier to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners. Although an early attempt failed, the idea later found expression in the 2006 operation that led to the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
The exchange that followed in October 2011 secured the release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar himself, who had spent more than two decades in Israeli jails.
For him, the episode demonstrated how capturing an Israeli soldier could create leverage that conventional negotiations had failed to achieve.
Released from prison, Sinwar returned to Gaza with that experience and his knowledge of Israeli society.
He rose through Hamas’s ranks and became its leader in the besieged territory in 2017. But his background in the resistance movement’s security apparatus predated his imprisonment.
He had helped establish Hamas’s first security organisation, al-Majd, which sought to identify Palestinians collaborating with Israel.
That security background would become significant in the years leading up to October 7. Following the assassination of Qassam Brigades commander Mazen al-Fuqaha on March 24, 2017, Sinwar ordered a crackdown in which 45 informants giving information to Israel were arrested.
The campaign later featured in accounts of how Hamas sought to counter Israel’s spy network as it prepared for the October 2023 operation.
Making containment look convincing
By 2017, when Sinwar had become Hamas’s leader in Gaza, the territory was under a long-running Israeli blockade that restricted movement, commerce and access to essential goods.
Periodic arrangements over crossings, fuel and economic activity offered limited relief, but left Gaza’s population dependent on decisions made by Israel and regional intermediaries.
Haaretz reported that, in early 2023, Sinwar opened a discreet negotiating channel with Israel to explore a long-term ceasefire and future arrangements for Gaza.
Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas official fluent in Hebrew, was reportedly tasked with directing communications with Shin Bet official Adi Rotem through an intermediary described as a senior Fatah official operating under the pseudonym “Coal Eyes.”
The reported proposals focused on easing the Israeli siege’s economic burden, expanding freedom of movement and employment opportunities, securing prisoner releases and establishing a more durable arrangement for Gaza.
Efforts to secure relief for Palestinians addressed immediate needs while also serving Hamas’s broader political and strategic calculations.
In February 2025, Hamas officials Mahmoud Mardawi and Jasser al-Barghouti discussed his approach in interviews to Al Jazeera.
Al-Barghouti said Sinwar also approached Egypt to develop trade and spoken with Qatar about expanding Gaza’s economy.
These efforts could be presented publicly as the work of a leadership focused on governing a besieged territory and easing the inhuman conditions imposed on its population. Al-Barghouti said they were also part of the cover for the military preparations.
The political scientist Leila Seurat, in The Foreign Policy of Hamas, describes Hamas’s “logic of appeasement” during the November 2019 exchanges of fire between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. By staying out of that confrontation, Hamas secured the opening of the Kerem Shalom crossing, fuel deliveries and an extension of the maritime territory available to Palestinian fishermen.
Those were tangible gains in the besieged territory where Israel controlled the principal routes for goods and movement.
Their significance for Sinwar’s strategy was that restraint could have an immediate public purpose while also influencing how Israel assessed Hamas. As al-Barghouti put it, “all these matters were taking place as part of the cover.”
Sinwar’s approach was based on ground realities. Gaza needed trade, fuel and employment. The strategic advantage lay in the fact that these genuine political and economic concerns could reinforce the impression that the resistance movement had shifted away from confrontation.
Israeli assessments increasingly reflected that impression. Nitzan Nuriel, an Israeli brigadier general and former director of the so-called counter-terrorism bureau in the prime minister’s office, said Israel had “created a new level of deterrence.” Hamas, he argued, was “very disturbed” and doing almost everything it could to prevent its organization and supporters from opening fire against Israel, while also restraining other groups.
The Israeli website Ynet reported that the military, spy agency Shin Bet and COGAT—the agency coordinating civilian affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories, shared the view that Hamas had been deterred and was not interested in war.
A situational assessment shortly before October 7 concluded: “Sinwar has no interest in a widespread conflict.”
At a May 2023 cabinet discussion, the head of military intelligence research reportedly said Israel had achieved deterrence following the 2021 Gaza war, according to a 2025 report by the Israeli state comptroller.
These judgments gave Sinwar’s strategy an opening. Israel was not unaware that Hamas conducted training or maintained armed forces. Rather, its spy apparatus interpreted visible activity through a prevailing assumption: Hamas had been contained by the cost of previous confrontations and the benefits of managing Gaza.
Training Israel could see
Hamas did not try to conceal every military exercise. Some training was conducted openly in Gaza, including exercises on mock settlements constructed parallel to Israel’s separation barrier.
The visible routines helped establish an appearance of business as usual; training continued, but it could be understood as defensive preparation rather than a plan for a large-scale operation.
Sinwar also publicly dissolved the elite Nukhba commando unit of the Qassam Brigades and reorganized the resistance into brigades. The restructuring reinforced the impression that Hamas’s military activity had been constrained by occupation.
On October 7, Nukhba fighters led the charge against Israeli military bases in the region surrounding the besieged Strip in southwestern occupied Palestine.
The use of motorized paragliders offered a particularly clear example of how preparation could take place under a civilian-facing explanation.
In the accounts given by Hamas officials in 2025, Sinwar formed a company for paraglider training. Its public purpose was to raise the morale of Gaza’s disillusioned youth, many of whom had never seen beyond the coastline because of the inhuman restrictions put on movement by the Israeli regime.
The company also gave the Qassam Brigades a means of training fighters to fly. According to the officials, the exercises simulated missions similar to those later carried out on October 7.
Other factions asked to participate, and the Qassam leadership allowed them to simulate the drills without disclosing the underlying plan. Mardawi described the training as camouflage against the enemy.
The paragliders were a novel element of the October 7 operation and became one of its most recognizable symbols.
Sinwar’s approach was not to make the existence of training invisible. It was to separate what observers could see from what they could know about its intended use.
The same principle informed “Mighty Pillar 4,” a joint exercise held by Palestinian resistance factions on September 12, 2023, marking the fourth year of drills organized by the joint operations room.
The exercise simulated attacks on three Israeli military sites in the occupied West Bank and was publicly presented as a test of coordination and the ability to respond to emergencies.
Mardawi said Sinwar instructed commanders to conduct the exercise openly “because the enemy would detect any covert operation through aircraft.” The exercise could be observed while its scenario directed attention toward a possible operation in the occupied West Bank rather than the unprecedented operation being prepared from Gaza.
Reports after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation said many troops from Israel’s Gaza Division had been reassigned to the occupied West Bank. The transfer had been regarded as one factor in the regime’s lack of readiness when Hamas attacked.
An Israeli military investigation later concluded that Hamas’s prewar conduct included “components of deception” that “fed and reinforced” the belief that the movement was deterred and uninterested in a major war. “In retrospect,” the investigation said, that belief “was a big mistake.”
Controlling information inside Hamas
The strategy also depended on limiting the number of people who knew the plan. There are indications that Hamas’s political bureau, based outside Gaza, did not know the timing, location or scale of the operation in advance.
Senior political leader Mousa Abu Marzouk told The New Yorker in October 2023 that “all of Hamas’ leaders who are not military ones received the news early Saturday morning,” the morning of October 7 itself.
The account suggests that Sinwar’s secrecy extended beyond Israel’s spy networks to parts of Hamas’s own political leadership.
The campaign against informants was another part of this effort. Following al-Fuqaha’s assassination in March 2017, Sinwar had 45 informants arrested.
Mardawi later described Israel’s reliance on informants in the assassination as “a strategic mistake,” stating that the arrests deprived Israel of human intelligence about the October 7 preparations.
In an earlier February 2025 interview, al-Barghouti said Hebrew-language media had suggested the campaign may have been one factor in the operation’s success.
Sinwar also paid sustained attention to the collection and interpretation of intelligence. Muhanad Seloom, a researcher in West Asian studies, cited an unnamed senior Hamas official in Qatar, interviewed on September 2, 2024, who described the emphasis on studying Israel’s analytical process: “we invested more in studying Israeli analysts than in weapons training, because if you control the analysis, the battlefield opens itself.”
Regional calculation
The so-called Abraham Accords, brokered by the United States in 2020, marked a shift in regional diplomacy, as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established formal relations with the Israeli regime, followed by some other Arab states.
By pursuing “normalization” without securing an end to Israel’s occupation or a resolution of the Palestinian question, the agreements allowed regional governments to deepen ties with the occupying regime while leaving Palestinian demands for freedom and self-determination unresolved.
The prospect of Saudi Arabia joining the process threatened to further sideline the Palestinian cause.
For Sinwar, the “normalization” drive represented a direct challenge to the Palestinian struggle, raising the prospect that Arab governments would pursue their strategic and economic interests with Israel at the expense of Palestinian aspirations.
The accords threatened to weaken the regional pressure on Israel that had long been tied to the Palestinian question, leaving Palestinians increasingly marginalised.
According to reports from October 2, 2023, Sinwar said that “there is no alternative to an unusual move by the movement and the forces of the resistance axis” to prevent a negative strategic shift.
The operation’s name, Al-Aqsa Flood, placed al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied al-Quds at the center of its political framing.
The name invoked a site of religious and national significance to Palestinians and Muslims and presented the operation as part of a wider struggle against imperialism.
It was also a way of challenging the prospect that the Palestinian issue could be sidelined while Arab governments pursued “normalization” with the occupying regime.
For Sinwar, the challenge was to break the sense of security that had allowed Israel to believe it could contain Gaza while the region moved towards the so-called normalisation.
He had spent years studying the regime that held him captive, risen to lead Hamas in Gaza and built a strategy around the belief that Israel’s military superiority did not make it invulnerable.
Al-Aqsa Flood shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility, exposing the weaknesses of the regime long portrayed as one of the region’s most “formidable military powers.”
By striking at the heart of Israel’s military and spy apparatus, Sinwar became an enduring figure in the history of the Palestinian resistance, his name bound to a struggle against occupation that extends far beyond his own lifetime.
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